The Village of South Jacksonville’s Police Department is needing some new technology to meet the demands of a state mandate.
Village Police Chief Eric Hansell presented to the board a proposal to purchase a computer server for the police department in order to have more robust storage for body camera and dash camera footage.
Hansell says their current system involves exchanging an external thumb drive from dash cameras and downloading footage to an officer’s desktop computer that slows down the process of getting footage to himself and the state’s attorney’s office in cases of prosecution.
Hansell says the new system he’s proposing would offer larger storage space and speed up that process: “Anytime you are going to store a lot of data as far as video or photographs, it consumes a lot of server space. Right now, to start the process of upgrading the police department into the body cameras and squad car cameras, we need to get to the heart of the system, which would be a server to store the data. If [we] create all of this data, we have to have a place to put it, so we are looking at upgrading and adding a server to the police department that will store all of our data and have a [strong] central heart of the system.”
Hansell says the footage has to be stored for a certain length of time before it can be deleted under Illinois law.
The server would be 12 terabytes and would have wi-fi capability allowing for a wi-fi upload-download process as soon as a squad car enters the parking lot of the police department. It would also give Hansell access directly to the server with his own desktop computer rather than forcing him to log into another desktop. Cost of the system is estimated to be around $3,600 from Matt Martin Consulting.
The proposal has been placed on next week’s board meeting agenda for final approval.